Nicole Vella is a Toronto based computer artist and web developer who uses code and shaders to build generative artworks and installations that probe how technology shapes perception and experience.,She studied art at OCAD University, where she also worked as a teaching and research assistant in computer programming and wearable technology.
Vella first made art through darkroom photography in high school, then taught herself to code as a teenager by viewing the source of websites she visited. After years of working as a web designer, she enrolled in art school in 2018, and a 2020 course on shaders was the point at which she began to see code as a creative medium in its own right, inspired by generative art pioneers such as Sol LeWitt and John Whitney. She discovered blockchain art that same year and began releasing work through Art Blocks and fx(hash).
Her Art Blocks Curated project This Is Not A Rock (2023) generates realistic rock textures and forms using fractional Brownian motion and ray marching techniques, its title referring to Rene Magritte's 1929 painting The Treachery of Images.Text Me When You Get Home, a series of 144, was released as part of “N=12”, a Feral File group show curated by Aaron Penne that opened in July 2023.If You Could Do It All Again was released through a live minting event at Gotham in New York in collaboration with Bright Moments while Vella was the venue's artist in residence, its grid of colours reflected and diffused through a rotating glass like structure to evoke cyclical time.
